Just my opinion, but RA's business model just cannot sustain over the long term, especially with upcoming players rising up offering up strong competition. Some of this competition having latest innovative technologies and at lower costs to the customer than what Rockwell can offer. RA is going to come to a cross-roads at some point, and I believe that is a mathematical certainty. They will either need to beat the competition in price-to-performance ratio, OR......beat the competition with innovation. Right now, they can do neither of those things. In fact, they are absolutely terrible at both. Their price-to-performance ratio for any of their products is sky high. Moreover, they are
not an innovative company, not by a long shot! All of that is going to catch up to them eventually. Sure, they may be able to retain many of their big customers and long-lasting customers, and that may be good enough for them. But they aren't going to gain new customers, or at the very least, they won't gain nearly as many new customers as they potentially could have.
Why force customers to pay for something in a newer version of your software, that they didn't have to pay for before in previous versions??? Did RA enhance and make that feature better, hence justifying making the feature a premium?? Nope. It was just to increase profits, nothing else. That's how RA rolls. Instead of offering great
innovative products that the customer will love and buy, RA just raises prices, and charges a premium for everything. In a nutshell, that's their business model.
They lost us as a customer for all those reasons mentioned above and more. We moved away from RA seven years ago and haven't looked back.
Rising competition in the Industrial Automation sector
Innovator's Dilemma